Or several.

I've been cultivating back-up plans since my year nine SATs, when dawned the first inklings of realisation that there might be a world beyond protractors, and that one day I would inevitably snap like a cheap Biro, push over my wobbly desk-for-one, shriek "Release me, cruel exam machine!

"I am more than a candidate number! You will never have my soul!" in a voice like Gollum, and dash out to embark on a new life as an Avon lady.

With every year and every exam season that goes by, I am astonished that the snap has not yet come.

I sit, I wait, I listen, I line all my spare pens up along the table and pretend they're people (only 32, being the reckless, carefree imp I am), but the snap never comes.

I thought it had come during my GCSE French oral, when a crippling mental block left me able only to remember the words "comment dit on …..?" out of the entire language, and thus have my entire speech translated for me word by word while I waved my hands around and tried to look like Amelie. But it hadn't.

Then I was convinced snap-time had come during A-level drama, sitting a two-and-a-half hour paper on an RSC performance of As You Like It that I'd slept through.

All I remembered was a lead actress who looked vaguely like Sally Webster from Corrie.

It was a beautiful nap, enjoyed not only myself, but my whole class and the teacher, who then endeavoured to cover the whole examined syllabus in the last two hours of term after a year spent lying on the floor pretending to "be the colour purple".

But that wasn't the snap, only a yogic bend.

The snap is still coming, and if I had any overdraft left I'd put money on it being this year.

In two weeks I sit a six-hour Chaucer exam, for which I haven't opened a book yet. I can hear myself creaking in snap-preparation, each revision-shy day that drips away pushing me that inch closer to a new life as, say, an Ann Summers party rep, or the person who puts the orangey bit inside Jaffa cakes.

Indeed, formulating glorious back-up plans is using up most of my reading-note-making-and-general-cleverness time, so I could hardly revise even if I wanted to.

But of course I don't want to, I want to have my own hat stall in Spitalfields market. Or make up the messages for the insides of bad birthday cards.

Or be one of the people dressed up as an 18th century maidservant who sells you herbs at an open air museum.

Or open a café that sells food the way you ate it when you were five, like crisp and ketchup sandwiches with the crusts cut off and milk with a straw to blow bubbles in.

It'd be a goldmine.

I've reached the point where my collection of Dreams Of Secret Satisfaction (DOSS) takes up so much of my time and brain that it's difficult to recall my Genuine Actual Aim for Happiness (GAAH).

People ask what I want to do when I'm grown-up and I have to fight past: "I want to be the one at the Rimmel factory who thinks up the fanciful names for shades of lipstick and nail varnish," to reach, "Oh yeah…journalism."

I'm not the only one nursing wonderful back-up plans. My mother, when she grows up, wants to be an archivist for The Archers.

My dad has (formerly) secret aspirations as a voiceover artist for adverts.

My boyfriend, another would-be victim of the media mangle, wants to be a venomous, people-hating, second-hand bookshop owner in the mould of Bernard Black.

My flatmate Sian wants to be a mechanic, or a kept woman.

Unfortunately, in true grass-is-greener tradition, my friend Vlora is leaving her ultimate DOSS as a toyshop assistant in Hamleys to go back to uni…which I think qualifies as a reverse snap, don't you?

And makes me think I should put a lid on it, and go buy my 32 pens.

-------------------------------------
Click here for more Lauren Bravo.

Where are you? Add your pin to the Herald's international readers' map by clicking here.

Email the Herald: letters@worthingherald.co.uk